Perhaps you all want to know what goes on in England. Here is a sample GCSE maths exam, taken at the end of year 10, or later, or still later. 3 exam papers in all. This is at the “higher”level and it shows what is expected by any student wanting to go on to higher education (University). Of course, more is required of those wanting to study maths, hard science or engineering. For the rest, maths stops here. These papers are taken by the upper 30% of students. There is a foundation level as well, in which the top grade is deemed OK for college.
Check this for the same stuff from another examining company:http://solvemymaths.com/2015/01/16/the-new-gcse-3-aqa-paper3/

Interestingly, Pearson has got its sticky fingers into the UK game as well.

So with the impending new GCSE, I thought it’d be a good idea to publish a few thoughts on the new specimen papers. What better way to do it than to sit each paper myself, then write down my random rambling thoughts afterwards…

I decided I’d do the OCR Higher papers first. There are three, but I just did Paper 4 (which is paper 1… very confusing). This is a calculator paper, although I didn’t really need one for 95% of the questions.

TIme Allowed: 1 hour 30 minutes

Time Taken : about an hour, during which I ate some sandwiches and listened to Radio 6 and took a phone call.

I didn’t check any of my answers once I’d moved onto another question, and I wrote comments in as thoughts jumped into my head. There are a few notes post-test when I looked over the mark scheme, which…